The Three Visit Rule

     We don’t entertain too many guests in my house.  The guests we do have are usually frequent visitors, so in order to keep the visits light-hearted and simple, we adopted a policy of three visit hospitality to help people feel more at home as quickly as possible.

     The Three Visit Rule is simple.  When you visit us the first time, we will wait on you and serve you anything we have.  the second time you visit, we will still serve you and begin to show you where we keep our refreshments.  On the third visit, you’re on your own.  If you’d like a beer, go to the fridge and help yourself. Hungry?  You now know where the pantry is.  After three visits, you are completely at home while visiting us.

     I found that this rule is accepted 8000 miles away in villages on the coast of Kenya.  One of my favorite restaurants was in Galu-Kinondo.  Mama Isabel’s Roof Garden is a pub and café on the second floor of a store and rooming house across the street from the house on the beach which our team lived in while in country.  Most afternoons, I would walk across the dirt street to have a stout and some chips.  I soon became familiar and expected at Mama Isabel’s.

     One hot afternoon, I climbed the stairs and was greeted by young Gloria, one of the servers.  She welcomed me and bid me take a seat.  After she busily finished with other patrons, she brought me a stout, apologizing for the delay.  I dismissed her worries, telling her that I should have served myself for as many times as I had visited.  I had her sit with me to rest for a few minutes while I shared with her the Three Visit Rule of my house.  She told me that my rule wasn’t new to Kenya and quoted me the Swahili version:

“Mgeni siku ya kwanza mkaribisha vizuri, siku ya pili mpikia ugali na mboga, siku ya tatu mpe jembe aende shambani.”

     It basically says that on the first visit, you will be served, that all is good. On the second day you will cook your own food of porridge and vegetable (from the garden.)  By the third visit you’ll be given a plow to work in the garden for your own food.  This third visit would be a stretch, even for the most lazy of hosts, especially in a gracious country like Kenya.  But we get the big idea.

     After three visits here, you are part of the household.  Please.  Make yourself at home.  Come on in.  Grab a beer.  Have a seat and relax in front of the television for a few minutes.  As soon as you’re finished with your beer, we have some chores for you.

Karibu.

The Meal

     While I was attending the children's Christmas Show earlier this week, I overheard the conversation next to me.  An acquaintance of ours is nursing his wife back to health after a terrific car crash and is having trouble making good meals for the family with the extra work on his routine.  We are going to be part of a list of people who are making meals for the family while they work through the healing time.

I'll gladly cook for them.  It'll be a chance for me to get back into the kitchen after so many months of daily seeking meals and cooking for myself.  I learned a lot in Kenya about the meal, the difference between a cook and a chef, and the ways that we all perceive food and eating.  Preparing a meal for others will keep me mindful of the importance of this work.

We don't think about the time that is spent every day procuring food or preparing it.  We have two choices.  Quick and easy from boxes and cans, or time-consuming from raw ingredients.  The former is the way that I used to operate in the kitchen.  Even when I had bulk ingredients, they were prepared with the aid of canned broths or boxed sides.  Now I am able to start from scratch with basic ingredients and put together a meal that looks simple but requires time and patience to achieve.  This is the starting point for the way I'll cook from here on out.

The women, and some men, in Kenya devoted a better part of the day to the preparation of the meal.  Ingredients were usually harvested from the shamba or purchased fresh at the kiosks in the village.  Then the ingredients were carefully cut and chopped by hand without the aid of appliances found in our kitchens.  The meals I prepare with the skills I picked up in Kenya don't have a lot of variety but if I add these methods to my other cooking, that will be remedied.  It's more important now to table a simple meal that is valuable not in its sophistication but in the time and care that it took to prepare it.

With time, I will present these recipes adapted to my lifestyle in the States.  Then it should be easy to present the other meals we've grown up with the same care that goes into the Kenyan meal.  In the mean time, I will get ready for my turn to cook for the busy family down the road, and the meal they get from this house will have the freshest stuff I can find and will be prepared by hand with as much time as I can find.

Kufurahia chakula.

Swimming in the Indian Ocean

These young men were using this boat, ironically named "FISHING BOAT", as a diving platform.

Dogs on the beach.

The title about says it all.


This picture gives you an idea of the typical appearance of the coastline below Mombasa.  


Look in the background and you can see three boys moving their bicycles down the beach and a guy wearing a blue shirt just sitting on the berm watching us.

Then there's the obligatory appearance of the yellow dog.  There's a yellow dog in every area we visited.  There's a yellow dog in every place you'll ever visit. 

Kukaa. Mbwa nzuri.

The bicycle guys from the first picture showed up to see what was happening.

Mkokoteni

This isn't in order with the rest of the pictures that are on here. It happens to be in a folder that was started shortly after I arrived in Kenya.

These carts, mkokoteni in Swahili, are everywhere. They are a very common way for small businesses to get goods for their kiosks and dukas from Mombasa to the bush.

This particular cart isn't loaded anywhere near as much as it could be. Sometimes one cart would be piled up 6 feet high with goods and it would take 5 or 6 men and boys to push the thing.

The best part of the cart pushers' day was in negotiating the two approach ramps to the ferry in Mombasa. To get down to the ferry, the cart would try to escape by way of gravity on the way down the steep concrete ramp, with the pushers all forcing the back of the cart down to drag the ground. The back of the cart is equipped with a skid brake made of pieces of tire that will stop the cart by friction in case the puller lets go of the pulling bars. Once across the ferry, the pushers and the puller work the cart across the ramp back and forth, adjusting the course of each pass so that the cart worked its way up hill a little at a time just like a sailboat tacking across the wind.

In the scheme of the local transportation system on the Coast, these carts are the first level used to move goods in large quantities.

Djibouti

This is how I will forever remember Djibouti. The area I was in was hot, brown, and unfriendly.

There are many areas of this small country that are warm, beautiful, and welcoming, but I didn't see those. So this is the way I remember it.

Maybe the day will come when I can visit again with tourism in mind.